Abstract
Alcohols have always been an important component of drugs, and their design, discovery, synthesis and preparation play an important role in the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of diseases. To synthesize most of organic compounds, we need to perform a variety of selective hydroxyl protections of reagents to synthesize target molecules. Among these protection reactions, formylation is the most commonly used method to protect the hydroxyl groups in organic synthesis. Methods to convert alcohols to formamides are of interest due to the many uses of formamides as synthetic intermediates. These methods include stoichiometric reactions of formylating reagents and catalytic reactions with ethyl formate as the carbonyl source. This review discusses the reported catalytic approaches for the formylation of alcohols to preparation of formate esters.
Graphical Abstract
Acknowledgment
We thank the reviewers for their constructive comments in improving the quality of this paper.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.